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Sign up with Google Sign up with FacebookQ: Why is there an apostrophe before the "an" word in Chinese?
I never understood this. Xi'an, Yan'an for example...also whenever I read pinyin I see gong'an (police), ping'an (safe) etc etc. Why is this?
10 years 46 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
I think it is to "mark" that they are two different characters. But I am only guessing.....
because such pinyins could be misunderstood if without the apostrophe. Xi'an refers to the 西安city but xian reads as 先. gong'an is police but gongan could read as gon gan. there is no “gon ” in pinyin though. pin gan and ping an stand for different words.
Xi'an is two syllables in pinyin but xian is just one syllable and has a completely different meaning. Without the apostrophe in Yan'an it could be read as either ya nan or yan an.
Repeating what Kaiwen and ohChina said (GuilinRaf is also right):
先 = xian, one word.
Add an apostrophe at the end of the first word, the IME defaults to: 西安 (xi an), two different words.
Xi'an is two words, Xian is supposed to be one word. I say supposed to because some people make this mistake when writing Chinese on the phone/computer.
Unrelated, but something I didn't realize for months after learning Chinese: you also type "woman (女人)" by typing "nvren" instead of "nuren." Unicode doesn't have a wavy-tone "u" character. All other characters are the same way.
nu + wavy tone = nv.
lu + wavy tone = lv
etc.